In an era of artificial wonders, authenticity—or at least the illusion of it—is only going to become a more coveted commodity. Perhaps that’s one reason country music has ruled the highest reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 for most of the summer. And no one is selling authenticity like Oliver Anthony, a former factory worker from Virginia who was totally unknown until his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” hit No. 1 two weeks ago. His rise is surprising, but it also fits with a long pattern of audiences cherishing—and power brokers exploiting—figures who seem like the real deal.

Sporting a beard and voice of comparable wildness, Anthony yowls a blend of working-class angst, complaints about the welfare state, and references to child trafficking by elites on “Richmond.” The power of his performance is straightforward; the reaction has not been. While right-wing figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene evangelized for the song days after its release, music-industry experts wondered if an astroturfed campaign was unfolding: Digital downloads, an outdated and easily manipulated format that receives outsize weight in how the charts are calculated, drove the song’s initial ascent. Such suspicions—as well as liberal criticisms that Anthony’s lyrics dissed poor and obese people—spurred indignation from political pundits for whom Anthony’s success confirmed various pet narratives. At the GOP presidential debate, the very first question was about Anthony: “Why is this song striking such a nerve in this country right now?”

The story has become even more complicated since then. Driven more now by streaming than downloads, “Richmond” is spending a second week at No. 1, which suggests that it has found a genuine foothold among listeners (unlike country’s other recent benefactor of right-wing rage, Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which plummeted to No. 21 after one week at the top of the chart). And Anthony is pushing back against attempts to use him as a political prop. In a video he posted on Friday, he said he laughed at the fact that he was invoked at a GOP debate. “That song was written about the people on that stage,” he said. He also defended himself against liberal allegations that his lyrics attack the needy. What he’s doing, he said, is speaking the truth about how America’s “haves” work to keep its “have-nots” feeling helpless.

The video in which he says these things is a fascinating document. Anthony talks for 10 minutes into the camera, from the front seat of his truck, while rain hammers the roof. Behind the conflagration of his beard is a face of actorly wholesomeness, with a wry smile and slate-blue eyes. He speaks with quiet carefulness about having connected with disgruntled workers across the world. Stardom beckons, but he’s wary: “I don’t want to go on some roller-coaster ride and come off a different person.”

Anthony began writing music in 2021, during what he describes as a dark period for the world and for himself. The scattered songs he has posted online connect personal problems such as sadness and addiction to the failings of modern society: “People have really gone and lost their way / They all just do what the TV say,” goes a typical line from “I Want to Go Home.” Hot-button issues show up—one song, “Doggonit,” maligns insect protein and self-driving cars—but mostly as a scary contrast with his rural refuge: “There’s a little town somewhere, the only thing you hear at night / Is that old mill humming.” If his policy views sound confusing and occasionally conspiracy-minded, they might be taken as evidence of how many despairing Americans have been fed confusion and conspiracy theories rather than a constructive political vision.

If anything is radical here, it is not Anthony’s ideology but his asceticism. He’s sick of Republicans and Democrats, but more forcefully, he’s sick of technology, and most of all sick of working for the man. What he wants to do, he says in his songs, is relax with pot, wine, and his dogs. These are classic country-music wishes, but Anthony’s lonely, scraping voice creates a more apocalyptic mood than what Nashville tends to promote. Messianic musical traditions—gospel with its transcendence of the material world, or even reggae with its rejection of Babylon—come to mind. But he is, thus far, a reluctant savior at most. He claims to have turned down an $8 million record deal. He wants to remain, as he wrote on Facebook, “just some idiot and his guitar.”

Oliver’s arrival can’t help but bring to mind another white working-class hero in country music—though framing Zach Bryan in any sort of culture-war context feels a bit unfair. A 27-year-old former Navy ordnanceman from Oklahoma, Bryan has mostly avoided talking politics outside of labeling himself a libertarian and discouraging transphobia. His influences include classic country voices such as Merle Haggard, indie-rock softies such as Bon Iver, and, most of all, Bruce Springsteen and his grit, idealism, and vulnerability.

Bryan’s rise began when he, while still in the military, started posting lo-fi videos of himself singing and playing guitar. For a taste, look to “Heading South,” which he filmed in September 2019. He’s outside at night, bugs humming in the background. He has the jawline of a superhero and the guileless air of a cherub. The phone camera is at knee height, his pupils and skin flash red, and he sings in great, gasping gulps. The song is a tumble of strummed chords set to an anxious rhythm tapped out by his left leg. The lyrics celebrate a rural misfit who amazes the world with his songs. “They’ll never understand that boy and his kind,” goes one line. “All they comprehend is a worthless dollar sign.”

Read: When small-town pride sounds like anger

Today, that song’s narrative feels like a prophecy. Bryan touts a Grammy nomination, a top-10 Hot 100 hit (“Something in the Orange”), a sold-out arena tour, and collaborations with stars including Kacey Musgraves and the Lumineers. He somewhat fits the mold of “alt country” singers who capture the NPR crowd, but if you scroll through social media, you’ll find fan fervor reminiscent of what’s bestowed upon telegenic rappers or Taylor Swift.

Last week, he released a self-titled album that applies a light dash of polish to his primary asset: his voice. Bryan sometimes sounds like he’s on the verge of laughter and other times like he’s delivering his lyrics in a sobbing bellow. Usually, he seems to be rasping around a syllable, giving his melodies a kind of bleeding, watercolor effect. His songwriting is elegantly idiosyncratic too. “Summer’s Close” strings together nature metaphors to describe romance, but if you listen closely, you hear a specific story about illness and loss. The song closes, “Tonight I’m dancing for two.”

Bryan, like Anthony, has a kind of defiant gravitas: Though Nashville’s current standard-bearer, Morgan Wallen, uses rural-versus-urban stories as grist for breezy romantic comedies, Bryan’s music is more like a Terrence Malick drama. He sings of being a wanderer, cycling between adventure and return, constantly renewing his appreciation for the simple life. On the spoken-word poem that opens his new album, he says that “excess never leads to better things / It only piles and piles on top of the things that are already abundantly in front of you.” On another track, “Tradesman,” he rejects the music industry’s overtures: “Give me something I can’t fake / That rich boys can’t manipulate / Something real that they can’t take / Cuz, Lord, I’m not your star.”

If an ideology underlies that hunt for “something real”—both for Bryan and for Anthony—it is most credibly described as an exhaustion with capitalism. These men sing of being drained by hustle, bored by superficiality, and weary of exploitation; they insist that the valuable things in life can’t be bought or sold. In Anthony’s professed reluctance to play ball with the music industry, you can, perhaps, see a similar impulse to the one that has led Bryan to take a stand against excessive pricing schemes for concerts. (The name of Bryan’s 2022 live album: All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster.)

But it would be naive to see either of these budding artists as serving any coherent political project. Music, especially popular music, rarely works that tidily. These men are, in fact, offering a different flavor of the same balm that pose-striking pop divas or slick Nashville bros do. Politicians comb culture for art they can co-opt as propaganda, but listeners tend to want something else: commiseration as they dream of a world purer than the one they live in.